we must marry
you to one of these young women!"

"Oh, General!"

"Well, why not?"

"That is a very serious thing--if one makes a mistake in his choice--that
is everything."

"Bah! it is not so difficult a thing. Take a wife like mine, who has a
great deal of religion, not much imagination, and no fancies. That is the
whole secret. I tell you this in confidence, my dear fellow!"

"Well, General, I will think of it."

"Do think of it," said the General, in a serious tone; and went to join
his young wife, whom he understood so well.

As to her, she thoroughly understood herself, and analyzed her own
character with surprising truth.

Madame de Campvallon was just as little what her manner indicated as was
M. de Camors on his side. Both were altogether exceptional in French
society. Equally endowed by nature with energetic souls and enlightened
minds, both carried innate depravity to a high degree. The artificial
atmosphere of high Parisian civilization destroys in women the sentiment
and the taste for duty, and leaves them, nothing but the sentiment and
the taste for pleasure. They lose in the midst of this enchanted and
false life, like theatrical fairyland, the true idea of life in general,
and Christian life in particular. And we can confidently affirm that all
those who do not make for themselves, apart from the crowd, a kind of
Thebaid--and there are such--are pagans. They are pagans, because the
pleasures of the senses and of the mind alone interest them, and they
have not once, during the year, an impression of the moral law, unless
the sentiment, which some of them detest, recalls it to them. They are
pagans, like the beautiful, worldly Catholics of the fifteenth
century--loving luxury, rich stuffs, precious furniture, literature, art,
themselves, and love. They were charming pagans, like Marie Stuart, and
capable, like her, of remaining true Catholics even under the axe.

We are speaking, let it be understood, of the best of the elite--of those
that read, and of those that dream. As to the rest, those who participate
in the Parisian life on its lighter side, in its childish whirl, and the
trifling follies it entails, who make rendezvous, waste their time, who
dress and are busy day and night doing nothing, who dance frantically in
the rays of the Parisian sun, without thought, without passion, without
virtue, and even without vice--we must own it is impossible to imagine
anything more contemptible.

Th